The Women Who Raised Me

by Victoria Rowell

  That was the most important lesson from her to me, one that could not be soft-pedaled or sweetened: that feeling sorry for myself was not an option. Such was the message I received on an evening in May when I returned from ballet class on a night that happened to be my fifteenth birthday. In the maelstrom of the activity earlier that day I had hoped that some kind of surprise party would be waiting for me. When I came home and saw not a sign of a celebration, there was nothing to feel but bitter disappointment. No one even remembered. I decided, birthdays were overrated, a belief that I reinforced for myself from then on, usually planning for the most minimal of remembrances, more in honor of Dorothy Collins Rowell than myself.

  I had crossed an invisible line, expecting my temporary family to remember the day I was born. I had hoped for too much. Time to add more armor.

  Over the course of the year, Lauren hadn’t appeared to be bothered by the fact that her mother and I had developed a close bond. That seemed to change when I became Rosa Turner’s Avon girl, happily shuttling products and collecting money from her clients at Boston City Hospital, where she worked. Not that Lauren wanted the gig; in fact, no one else seemed interested in doing that grunt work except me. The problem had to do with the complexities of relationships. I had encroached on delicate mother/daughter territory without knowing it.

  When I returned to Northampton Street from delivering Avon orders to customers, my head full of interesting adult conversation, Rosa sat me down on her plastic-covered furniture, and began explaining things to me. I knew then that our relationship would have to shift, and that these were not her words. She had to choose. I sat there, still. For a while, I thought my chest might break in two. I took several moments to arrest the lump in my throat, to find a way to breathe again.

  As the school year came to a close, I had to make a difficult decision for myself. I was standing in Rosa’s bedroom, watching her fill Avon orders from her personal apothecary of lotions and potions, when she invited me to stay on for another school year. I was tempted, dreading another separation, another good-bye, but I respectfully declined. I’d lost a closeness that I could never get back, and I had traveled the road long enough at that point in my life to be able to read between the lines.

  Many thoughts swirled in my head as I packed up my belongings that June. I would always love Rosa for so many reasons. I left Roxbury armored and ready for whatever the world had in store for me.

  Rosa and I remained in touch throughout the years, during which time I had occasion to revisit my most vivid memory of her. Under the stairs was a storage space so small one had to duck to enter. This was where Rosa could escape and feed her other passion, sewing. Illuminated by a small light on an industrial sewing machine, she sat with her broad back to me as I peeked in. The tilt of her head showed a tuft of auburn hair, her glasses low on her distinctive inheritance, which no one could take from her or give her permission to own—her father’s nose. I knew that she was somewhere far away in her mind, as she bent over her tiny stitches, surrounded by reams of fabric in her cubbyhole. Alone. At peace.

  SIX

  SYLVIA PASIK SILVERMAN

  After nearly fourteen years of widowhood, Agatha Armstead—believing that enough was enough and too much was foolish—decided that she had mourned Robert Sr. for a sufficient amount of time and that it would not be improper to receive the attentions of a suitor. Peter Cassell was several years older than her, a native of Montserrat whom she had first met fifty years earlier at choir practice. We were all shocked, but not because Ma should choose to have romance in her life, not at all. In her early seventies, she was still full of passion, femininity, and exuberance; of course she should have a loving companion, especially now that her years of raising children, grandchildren, and foster children were coming to an end. What I couldn’t understand was how Peter Cassell, an octogenarian at the time of their wedding, had blinded Agatha into not seeing his miserly, controlling side before it was too late. What cost companionship?

  When I left the Turners’, I moved into Peter’s house on Whiting Street. He made no effort to hide his pathological jealousy of my relationship with Ma, which he refused to acknowledge as a relationship at all, because, he said, I was not her daughter by birth or adoption. “How can you love her?” he asked Agatha. She took the path of least resistance, taking into consideration that he had no children of his own, and did her best to try to placate him.

  There was a certain element of convenience, if not security, in Ma’s relationship with Peter, which did keep her in the Boston area for six months out of the year. We could be together as I closed in on my last years at the Cambridge School of Ballet.

  To keep everything on an even keel, Ma encouraged me simply to be patient with Peter, promising that he’d warm up soon enough.

  I didn’t mind sleeping in the attic; I had done this more than once and it was rather charming. But the situation took a turn for the worse when a pestiferous Peter started rummaging through my things while I was out of the house. Peter rationed and hid food, threatened to cut off the phone, and wouldn’t allow me to use his washer or dryer, believing my contemporary fashions would ruin his older machines in the basement. This meant Agatha sent my clothes out to be laundered.

  I was treated as a tenant, rather than a family member, and required to say goodnight to Agatha before Peter’s bedtime—not one second after; otherwise I found their apartment door locked and lights out. When the holidays approached, Peter—proving to be the quintessential Scrooge—forbade us from having a Christmas tree, no explanation given.

  “Where will we put our presents?” I asked, once my bewilderment had a chance to register.

  “Under the piano bench,” Peter said.

  To make the best out of these increasingly uncomfortable dynamics, and money being the issue, I decided to create some holiday cheer for me and for Ma by decorating the banister between our floors with a garland of plastic-wrapped candy canes. What seemed diplomatic by taping them up outside the locked door of their apartment in a neutral zone ended in disaster.

  Later that December Sunday, a noisy crackling sound brought me running down the steps from the attic, where I was undone by the sight of a bare banister and a heap of rejected candy canes on the floor that had been ripped off in one felt swoop. That sight and the shock of seeing all of the fifteen hundred pieces of a jigsaw puzzle packed back in a box—the same pieces that Agatha and I had almost finished assembling together—were almost as shattering as the time, years later, when I stumbled upon paperwork documenting how Peter Cassell had actually charged Ma rent for housing me there.

  That Christmas, if we could have called it that, I set out in search of a new home base, and with nothing to lose, I defiantly went down to Dudley Station and brought back a surprise for Agatha. Peter stood in absolute shock as I single-handedly dragged the tree up the stairs and erected and decorated it, all the while humming Christmas carols. Ma was so happy. The miracle that followed was that Peter let us have our holiday.

  Together, Ma and I placed the festively wrapped gifts under the glorious pine. While we were both having so much fun, I noticed that she was visibly weary. My concern was that she no longer had the one person to whom Agatha always turned for true counsel.

  In the foregoing years, Aunt Marion had succumbed to the onset of Alzheimer’s and had moved to a nursing home. Ever since my arrival in Boston at age nine, no matter where I lived, I gravitated back to Aunt Marion and Uncle Al’s gray gingerbread house in Roxbury on Montrose Street.

  I wanted some of that soulful food that she and Ma, and all the Wooten women, baked, shucked, stirred, and frosted. I wanted to taste her signature lemon meringue pie, to know she still retained secrets for baking that delicate crust out of lard and love, and to know she was there to answer the door with life’s most essential welcoming, “Come on in, sugar, and take a load off.” I needed my Agatha, or the image of her. Disappointedly, I tucked a note in Aunt Marion’s screen door and moved on.

>   Toward the end of Aunt Marion’s days, Agatha honored me by asking if I would accompany her to the nursing home, an old Roxbury house converted for convalescent care. We arrived to see Marion seated on the edge of her bed, lost. Diffused light streamed through the gable, offering the only inspiration in an otherwise depressing scenario, until I was blessed by the chance to witness two remarkable souls trying to reconnect.

  There was no glossing over Marion’s absence or what remained of her trapped in a shriveled, corporal form—a shadow of the virtuoso I witnessed playing the organ in a downtown Boston church not so many years earlier. She kept repeating, “I want to go home, Sis. I want to go home.” Agatha calmed her frail older sister by wrapping her arms around her, rocking her. We sat in silence as words were useless.

  Agatha and I rose to leave. I reached out to Aunt Marion to kiss her for the last time, my lips touching her cold-cream-soft cheek. She looked at me and smiled that reassuring smile that had always told me that everything would be all right. Agatha led us out, then turned back to say, “Don’t worry, Sis, I’ll be back.”

  I wanted to fix it. I wanted to fix the hole that had formed in Ma’s life with the loss of her closest sister, to free her from Peter, to ward off the uncertainties of age and changing circumstances. I promised myself that some day I would, but in the meantime, I needed to get myself to terra firma—which turned out to be in Framingham, Massachusetts, a world away though only twenty westward miles from downtown Boston.

  It must have been a metaphysical call for Sylvia Silverman to have been so perfectly placed in my path at the most necessary time. She was everything that I might have asked for at the time and then some—given how amazingly she prepared me for my life to come.

  Sylvia was unselfish and instinctual—loving to the nth degree. Unwavering in her support, in her authentic being, in the sacrifices that she made for family, in the connection she maintained to her own dreams—allowing them to evolve as she nurtured the dreams of others. Sylvia not only gave me the confidence that I would need to compete for acceptance into the most prestigious international ballet schools and professional companies but also provided me with an introduction to privilege and all that it encompassed—travel, culture, restaurants, cars, current affairs, social etiquette. These were all a part of her world and by association would become part of mine. Instilling in me the value of responsibility that comes with privilege, Sylvia added to what I already knew about the need for financial organization and independence—especially for women, regardless of marital status. As my last foster mother before emancipation, no one could have prepared me more soundly for weathering that monuzmental change of status than Sylvia Silverman.

  In the mid-1970s when I first began staying overnight and sometimes through the weekends at the Silvermans’ home, at the invitation of their daughter Robyn—my ballet buddy “Robs”—Framingham was a mostly upscale enclave, a mix of old Boston wealth and the nouveau riche then flocking to the suburbs in so-called white flight spurred on by the busing crisis. Little did I know at the time that my ancestor, Warren Collins, was buried at the local cemetary. After living in the projects, Framingham was like going to the moon. The town was filled with both older and newer houses, some on smaller scales, others on expansive wooded estates, nestled next to gristmills and modern suburban mansions, along with smatterings of tennis courts, swimming pools, and the latest-model cars everywhere. Lawns and yards were kept meticulously manicured by oversized lawn mowers that we would have driven as cars in Maine.

  The feeling of being in a foreign land stopped whenever I entered the Silvermans’ comfortable two-story home on Maple Street. The more I visited, the more I understood where Robs had learned the fearlessness and confidence that she brought to her dancing, and I also could see that her incredibly giving nature was an inherited trait from Sylvia. A feeling of inclusiveness dominated the household, thanks to the two of them and the acceptance I also received from Robyn’s sister, Jill, and brother, Michael. Maurice Silverman—or “Slivey” as he was known—Robyn’s smart, hardworking dad, may have initially been less embracing of my presence, but at the same time was genuinely concerned for my welfare.

  On a weekend evening when I was staying overnight at the Silvermans’, Robs picked up on my distracted state of mind. I rarely told anyone about anything in my private life, but I felt a safety in confessing some of what was going on at what I was calling home. Robyn immediately offered, “You should come stay with us.” That would be incredible, I thought, but how would I tell Agatha? How could I leave her again?

  Bracing myself for disappointment, we hurried downstairs to the kitchen where Sylvia heard Robyn out and, with a look identical to her daughter’s, agreed, saying, “Vicki, we’d love to have you move in with us.” No hesitation, no deliberation. Robyn—a younger version of Sylvia with her long neck, chiseled face, and flawless alabaster skin—smiled at me with a “see, I told you so” look in her eyes. Standing there in her suburban, modern kitchen with all the latest conveniences, Sylvia smiled in welcome, looking to me like an early Italian Renaissance woman painted by Botticelli.

  When he was later informed, Mr. Silverman may have had some reservations about me moving in but dutifully complied with his wife’s and his daughter’s wishes. And so Mr. Silverman went to Roxbury to meet with Agatha to discuss the financial and logistic arrangements and to collect my belongings. Never liking the “cut of his jib,” as they say in Maine, Peter stood in the background wringing his hands, blinking through his bifocals and grinning. I hated leaving Ma alone because that’s really what it had become. Mr. Silverman struck up a conversation with Peter, mentioning how his family had once lived not far from his very house and how much the neighborhood had changed.

  Maurice Silverman ran a very successful linen and drapery business in Somerville, Massachusetts, that had been owned by Sylvia’s family, the Pasik brothers, and was passed on to him after he was so fortunate as to have made her his wife. The Silverman home was tastefully appointed in every way, with early American oak antiques and Sylvia’s prize collection of antique American blue glass. Her own watercolor paintings adorned the walls. My favorite was of a flamenco dancer, much different from the Saergent but still somehow familiar. It hung next to the fireplace near which Margot Fonteyn graced the cover of a large art book that was set on an elegant glass coffee table.

  For the first time that I could recall, I finally had my own room, furnished with a cream desk set, matching designer bedspread and curtains, and wall-to-wall shag carpeting.

  Early in the same summer that I’d moved into the Silvermans, I came across a photograph in their den of a young black girl in pigtails, reminding me more of myself than anyone in the Silverman family. How was she a part of this white Jewish suburban household and so meaningful to the tight nucleus that she had won a place on Mr. Silverman’s mantle? Who was she?

  Before long I would meet her. She was the daughter of Mr. Silverman’s sister and the comedian Richard Pryor. Her name was Elizabeth, and she was not much more than eight years old, and one of the most beautiful, angelic children I had ever seen. I was face-to-face with the person, younger than myself, who had broken the ice and paved the way for me to have a relationship with the man of the manor. Mr. Silverman adored her. Did I remind him of her when she was gone? Maybe. And maybe that was part of why he tolerated my stay. I had to hold onto that.

  Robs insisted that whatever was hers, including her family, could be mine, too. I wanted to offer her the same. I had a family of friends, much different from what she was accustomed to, that I wanted to share. In that process, I learned that not all friends could be friends to all. I did, however, cross-pollinate some friendships, such as with Jackie Legister. Jackie and I had continued to be close, stopping in at Paul’s Mall, our favorite jazz club, or a popular Jamaican hangout in Cambridge now and then. Since the three of us attended the Cambridge School of Ballet together, we had that common bond, too. It was like one big slumber party.

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bsp; The difference in backgrounds fell away more and more, a process helped by Robyn and Sylvia who included me in the family observances of all the holidays. We lit candles by the stove on Friday nights as the sun set on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath. I listened to prayers recited in Hebrew before feasts celebrating Rosh Hashanah, fasted on Yom Kippur, fried latkes and lit the menorah for Hanukkah, cooked for days to prepare a seder for Passover, and when a loved one passed away, I joined the family in sitting shiva, the traditional mourning rites. The rhythm and melodies of the prayers had a familiarity and solemn beauty that allowed me to connect and to follow along, which spurred a realization that true soul is omnipresent—on a farm, in the ’hood, and anywhere that the spirit lives.

  Tradition, heritage, and the importance of family were definitely pronounced in the Silverman household, but the main ingredient that nurtured me during my year there was how Sylvia infused ballet into the very air that we breathed—through literature, music, discussion, and food.

  Sylvia had trained to become a ballet dancer but had chosen to become an educator instead, in part to be able to devote time to her husband and children. Did she have any regrets? If so, she did not share them with me. My sense was that even if she could have gone back and done things differently, she would not have changed any of the decisions she had made.

  One of two girls born to the Pasik family, Sylvia was absolutely doted upon and raised in an atmosphere that combined the work ethic of New England and that of her Jewish immigrant family whose roots went back to Palestine. With a winning recipe of love and encouragement, her parents supported her in pursuing whatever she loved to do—all the essentials that would make her successful. Indeed, like Agatha, Sylvia was a pro at everything she touched—dance, painting, raising and educating children, antique collecting, her prized passion for breeding bichons frises, and throwing bashes for traditional holidays. For one of many celebrations, Sylvia enlisted me and Robyn to act as hostesses—providing us with uniforms and all—and then gave detailed instruction for serving.